Wayne allowed himself to be used as a human bomb against me by a manipulative liar. He could well have ended up on a murder or manslaughter charge. To express it in the mildest and most tactful way possible, he doesn't appear to have particularly good judgement.

This is what we should expect as he has no interest in the inner depths of people, but evaluates them as if they were cars, greyhounds or thoroughbred race horses.

I will humbly admit that I've been known to fall for this sort of manipulative deceiver myself. I'm thinking now of the time a gold ring which had great sentimental value for me went missing permanently. Only three people had had the opportunity to swipe it. One was Liz Jones whom I knew to be outrageous but totally reliable. Another was the cleaner in the hall of residence whose honesty I had had objective proof of.

The third candidate might have been described by Kipling as 'a Burma girl...from somewhere east of Suez where there ain't no ten commandmets, and the best is like the worst.'

Instead of drawing the obvious conclusion, I assumed I must have lost it, long after the Burmese girl mentioned casually that she'd been 'taking' things from other people we both knew. It didn't sink in, and for some time I made no connection between this admission and the money mysteriously disappearing from my purse, a phenomenon which abruptly ended when I stopped associating with her.

I allowed her to manipulate me into upsetting other people, once as a teenager and once in my 20s. I'm bitterly ashamed now. All I can say for myself is that at least I wasn't 65! Unless dementia is setting in, you're old enough to know better at that age.

I'm afraid that my partner and I were inveigled into confronting offensively a woman that Dafydd considered had given him a hard time as late as 2003. I even accused her of being ugly as I could not think of any other accusation. It wasn't even true, and it wouldn't have been her fault if it was.

I was ashamed almost immediately. My partner counselled me not to worry unduly. He said, ''We were be-Dafydded'', as if Dafydd was capable of casting a spell over us.

Even though Wayne would consider me to have come out of the gutter which takes away any glamour from the bend sinister, and I may even have Gypsy blood, that hasn't stopped me feeling the odd snobbish impulse, and on very rare occasions, expressing it, for which I was duly snubbed.

We all have these fleeting feelings. But snobbery is a weakness, and we have to try to overcome it as we would any other form of bigotry.

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Posted: Mon May 22, 2017 9:10 pm Post subject: As Flies to Wanton Boys Are We to Gods

I don't suppose Della imagined the confrontation between Wayne Flamenco and me would take place in such a perilous spot. But I have had very dark thoughts.

I suspected that if the worst had happened and Wayne had ended up on a manslaughter charge or whatever the case might have been, she would have been entertained and delighted. It's not just that she wouldn't have been bothered about my fate.

She wouldn't have had any concern for Wayne's welfare either. She coudn't possibly care about him, to wind him up with whatever lies they were. She would have seen the trial as a circus.

And when Wayne was shouting abuse at me like a mad thing and I responded like Xantippe with the chamber pot, she would have seen that as a play she had put on for her own amusement.

That was how my thoughts were tending. To test them against reality, I sought out someone I will call Nye who had had much to do with Della in the past.

Nye said she was a manipulative narcissist, a psychopath or sociopath. This may not be literally true. Bipolar can make people behave like narcissistic trouble makers temporarily. But do you need a 'friend' who is a part time narcissistic manipulator?

He said he'd been trying to wake people up for years. She didn't have any human feelings. He said he'd been through it. He'd twice been driven to the edge of suicide.

He said, ''Don't take it personally. To her, we're not human beings. We're ants.''

As I had thought that Della and I had a genuine and even close friendship for years - it was genuine on my side - I was naturally not too ecstatic on hearing this.

Some other significant relationships had broken up in my life, including that with my real parents, rather surprisingly. I had rather been hoping that what I perceived as my friendship with Della would be a reliable rock. Had we not clung toghether crying at a funeral? I'm afraid I've made shipwreck on that rock.

Naturally, I am not a little miffed to discover that she would have found it a good laugh if I had now been lying on a mortuary slab, all due to her fabrications. Why do I keep falling for duplicitous charmers, even though I know from long experience that favour is deceitful and beauty is vain, or whatever the Biblical quote is?

The King James Bible says,''It was not my enemy who so despitously used me but my old familiar friend.'

Another piece of Jacobean literature has it: 'As flies to wanton boys are we to gods. They kill us for their sport.'

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I was in Wetherspoons again today when I was approached by the manager who said he expected me to stay away for a while until things cooled down. This was deeply embarrassing. I don't like to be put in the wrong.

Having said that he was not totally unreasonable, and I negotiated my way to being welcome there after the general election. If I remember correctly, he did express a hope that he would not see Wayne again. He already knew that he lived in Caerleon, and was not to be feared as a regular.

I know I behaved like a child but I still think I was more sinned against than sinning. Perhaps humility is a great virtue but it doesn't feel very nice.

I think there is a more significant message to take home from the saga above than the importance of not giving in to your inner chimp in public. It is the importance of recognising that other people's inner tigers do exist.

Without being paranoid, it is helpful to accept that certain individuals may be pretty dangerous, even when this is not immediately apparent. When Wayne Flamenco took me by surprise by greeting me with the words,''Hello, Psycho!'', I shrugged it off, reasoning that there was no need to take any action whatsoever, or to take any precautions either.

I deduced that he was probably sniffing round Della, and had fallen under her influence. He was sure to get burnt eventually. That was punishment enough. Why should I stick my oar in?

I think my great mistake was to assume that my lackadaisical attitude to him would be echoed in his to me. This is obviously not true. It looks as if his attitude to me can fairly be described as murderous, at least when alcohol has released his inner demons.

I wouldn't have guessed this as he has a history of being quite quiet and apparently well behaved. I think the only long term clues were his apparent detachment from ordinary people and his snobbery which is not a good sign.

It's horrible to be constantly looking over your shoulder, expecting attacks where there is no sign of them. But if somebody is giving you indications that they hate you and would like to do you harm, it's best to bear in mind that they might really mean it!

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Back in the day my partner was joking to Wayne Flamenco about some fool who said he was wary of opening a business in Wales, considering that Welsh is a language that doesn't even have a word for 'entrepeneur.' No, Welsh has dozens of words for entrepreneur derived from verbs like 'mentro' and 'meiddio.'

It is English that doesn't have a word for 'entrepreneur'. That is why it has to borrow a French word. Saying that Welsh doesn't have a word for entrepreneur, is almost as stupid as saying that it doesn't have a word for car. Somebody said this to someone in my Welsh class in all seriousness. They said we had to use the English word 'car'.

Car is a Welsh word in the first place. It is English that has borrowed it.

To my partner's surprise, Wayne didn't understand the entrepreneur joke. Instead he said emphatically, ''I agree with you!'', and had a bit of a rant on how the Welsh had no concept of entrepreneurship. They had never invented anything.

This is not entirely true. We invented the longbow, certain mathematical symbols, the theory of evolution independently of Darwin, Peter's pies and mini-skirts.

My partner was a bit taken aback but didn't read anything into it. Perhaps the obvious conclusion , that Wayne was bigoted and thick , seemed a cruel inference to base on one conversation. It's nice to be nice and to give people the benefit of the doubt. But it can be taken too far.

When George W Bush later castigated the French for not having a word for entrepreneur, nobody hesitated to say he was a fool.

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Wayne said how marvellous it was that the Duchess of Devonshire had big sacks of animal feed lying around in the middle of the floor. That showed true breeding. She didn't have anything to prove.

If he had seen the same thing in a pleb's house, he would have despised the pleb for being such a disorganised lout.

Dafydd put on a pastiche of Wayne. ''When I was in the Duchess of Devonshire's pile, a maid came running in, saying, '''Ma'am, Ma' am, the house is on fire! You'll have to get out now or you'll be burnt to death!''

''But it wasn't the place of the maid to give a message to Her Grace. She should have given it to the over maid who would have given it to the butler who would have given it to the over butler.

''So, the Duchess stayed there and was burnt to death, an absolute martyr to the cause! I'd have liked to have stayed there, and be burnt to death with her, but I didn't think I was worthy.''

The manager and I agreed that I would be allowed back into Wetherspoons in Abergavenny after the general election. Taking this extremely literally, that should mean in twenty minutes from now when the polls close!

Although I have been treated no more harshly than anyone else would have been in the same circumstances, perhaps less so, I feel a sort of wounded dignity. After all when I was given change from £5 as if it was £10 in that very place, so I had more money after the transaction than I had before, I had only a brief struggle with my conscience.

My conscience won, and I returned the excess money to them. And that was the second time this happened! This is not a totally reasonable gripe as there is a high turnover of staff, and the present manager can't be expected to know about that.

The one good thing is that Wayne is not likely to be given a warm welcone there. My partner has known Wayne for most of his life, and he has reached an age when nostalgia about the friends of 'auld lang syne' kicks in.

He mistook familiarity for friendship. Until very recently, he was always clutching at irrelevant criteria which proved to him that Wayne was really a hell of a nice guy.

Now he says that Wayne has always been 'proud' in the sense of haughty. He also said that Wayne offered him a great car for nothing. But it turned out it wasn't nothing. It was £800.

My partner drove me to Pembrokeshire in it. It was not literally a cut and shut, but it might as well have been; it was so dangerous. It could have fallen to bits on the motorway. It failed its MOT test on just about every count.

When my partner e-mailed Wayne about this, Wayne went very quiet. He couldn't face the reality of what he had done. Who knows if he wasn't bothered that he was putting our lives at risk and charging us for the privilege, or if he was living in a fantasy world and didn't know what he was doing? In either case, he was a dangerous 'friend.' My partner has only recently given himself 'permission' to see the truth about him.

Wayne played on our sympathies. He made us feel that he was a martyr. We thought it quite outrageous that he had been accused of being a wife beater. Yet even in his own account, the police had come around more than once, perhaps several times, and he was threatened with arrest at least once.

I feel now that he was an emotional vampire. He probably extracted our sympathy under false pretences. I can't be quite sure he was guilty as I wasn't there. But he probably was.

According to him, his wife hit him and hid his glasses. This made him feel so helpless that he splashed out on laser treatment to cure his defective vision.

My experience tells me that he does not need that much provocation or indeed any provocation to be abusive to a petite woman. He needs little enough provocation to aim punches at her.

When I discussed this with my partner, he said that Wayne may not have been knowingly lying to us about the domestic abuse in his household. He would have been so drunk that he wouldn't have remembered anything.

After all on one occasion, Wayne collapsed drunk in the street. My partner and another friend just about carried him home. But because Wayne had now taken a dislike to the other friend, he later denied that the guy had been there. He claimed it was someone else who had helped my partner carry him home.

This is an example of his 'strong defences' in psychological jargon. My partner now says that Wayne lives in an alternative universe.

He doesn't actually know any posh people. All the people he knows have regional accents, generally Nottingham or Abergavenny accents. It is counter intuitive that such a soulless and materialistic person is living in a fantasy world, but he is.

My partner now suspects that he has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, something which would rule out the possibilty of his ever being a genuine friend to anyone. Male people with NPD are said to be misogynists. He did remind me of a former abusive and narcissistic patner of mine when he nearly catapulted me down the stairs with a punch. The body language was so similar.

He can't be cured, but I thought counselling might ameliorate the symptoms. Alas, I was wrong. He was in counselling for years, and it achieved zilch.

For decades my partner had an imaginary friend as children have. But he thought he was a real friend. He projected his own positive qualities on to Wayne where they didn't belong. And I made precisely the same mistake with Della.

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With the benefit of hindsight, I think Della was probably a fake friend from Day One. I can't be totally sure as she has been diagnosed with bipolar which makes her changeable.

Of course I didn't want to face the possibilty that it was an imaginary friendship as that is so painful to accept, but it's better to accept reality so as to avoid further abuse. Is there any other reason why people are so easily deluded about relationships?

You might like to look at some internet videos by Richard Grannon who calls himself the Spartan life coach. He thinks that a certain kind of upbringing can produce what he calls neurotic levels of naivite in a child.

If it is quite evident when you are a child that your parents hate and despise you, that is too threatening a fact to take in. You have to believe that your parents love you because that is what they are supposed to do.

So you interpret abuse as love. When you are an adult you will not recognsie abuse when you see it. You see it as something positive.

You will try to say something nice about your parents, and you won't see how ridiculous it is to do so. For instance you might say, ''Yes, our mother beat the shit out of us when she was drunk, but at least she never set the house on fire when we were inside it.'' And you will seriously believe that that was very big of her! It is like early onset Stockholm Syndrome.

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The psychologist Alice Miller had just escaped being put in a Polish ghetto by the Nazis. Her parents were in it.

Yet as an adult she felt sympathy for Adolf Hitler. His father had been brutal to him. Once he had nearly beaten him to death. The poor thing never had a chance.

After the occasion in March when Wayne said, ''Hello, Psycho!'', when he saw me in the street, I had a talk about him with my partner. We were both inclined to look into his past for explanations, perhaps even excuses.

So we reflected that he had failed his first year exams at university. My partner said that when he was a boy, his aunt used to beat him.

I didn't succumb totally to the fad for seeing every abuser as a victim. I said, ''I don't think you should hit your children, but until recently, most people did, at least in this country, and a lot of people still do. So why is Wayne more to be pitied and excused than anyone else?''

My partner said that Wayne was not hit in a casual ad hoc way. ''This was systematic.'' I was not totally taken by this sort of emollient talk, but I would have thought it big and virtuous of my partner and me to even toy with it.

We were being fair. We were looking for mitigation. We were being better human beings! That is not how Richard Grannon would see it at all.

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My son Byron listened patiently to my spiel about how Wayne had unwittingly made everyone despise and laugh at him with his snobbery and transparent pretensions.

He then said that some people would feel sorry for Wayne instead of despising him. I was proud of him for saying this. But I would add a caveat. If you must be sorry for people like that, be sorry for them at a distance.

Don't try to get involved in helping them or sorting their problems out. It won't work, and you'll only get hurt. Richard Grannon wouldn't even think it a virtue to feel pity. And pity can be lethal in these situations.

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Richard Grannon would say that when you are the victim in an abusive relationship, you can tell yourself that in putting up with it, you are showing compassion and empathy, you are being the bigger human being; the abuser was abandoned in childhood; no wonder he has issues; I can help him.

Richard Grannon says that this is fake morality. You are really just the slave of an addiction. It is repetition compulsion. It is also a form of post hoc reasoning.

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It might be the words of Jesus in the New Testament which first gave us this 'love your enemies' shit. It is interesting to reflect that according to the gospels, Jesus also commanded his followers to hate their fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters.

He allegedly said, ''If anyone comes to me and hates not his mother and father and brother and sister, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.'' One edition of the English Bible slipped up and substituted the words, ''Yea, and his own wife also.'' Copies of the 'Wife Hater's Bible' fetch a fortune today.

Today I entered Wetherspoons,not without trepidation. The first thing I saw on scaling the notorious staircase was Della holding forth to her remaining fan club, including Tristan.

So I departed and was greeted warmly outside an inn by Ian Holmes and two other men. All three had been on terms of sexual intimacy with Della, but that did not account for their friendship with each other. Ian said that Dai had put him in the picture abouut how Wayne had endangered our lives.

He said ruefully that behind all the airs and graces was not a very nice person at all. But he was puzzled by the two occasions when I let out my inner chimp. He said, ''Are you menopausal?''

Keith, an artist and biker from the Midlands, asked me how Della was. I said I was no longer on speaking terms with Della and I would never speak to her again. I tried to make the explanatory story sound entertaining.

He said, ''Oh yes, Della is crazy now, isn't she?'', but added, ''I can't believe you're not speaking to her!'' The last time I had met him, Della and I appeared to be as close as Siamese twins.

We spoke of other things and had a laugh. Keith then went to Wetherspoons and returned with Della and one of her drinking companions. I couldn't see her expression as she was wearing sun glasses but her mouth was smiling broadly.

Considering what Wayne had done, and that she was implicated up to the hilt, I felt hot anger rise up in my chest. I sprang up, exclaiming, ''It's definitely time for me to go!' '

It would have been OK if I'd left it at that, but the demon inside me needs must make me apostrophise about how I couldn't stay in the presence of a woman who had nearly brought about my death. I then had to follow it up by paraphrasing Shakespeare: 'As flies to wanton boys are we to Della. She kills us for her sport.''

If this had anything to do with the peal of laughter that soon rang out, it was probably at my expense rather than in sympathy with me.

I had said I would never confront Della about anything again as experience showed that it wouldn't achieve anything. On the contrary, she was adept at turning these occasions to her advantage, and making herself out to be a martyr.

She had done this not only to me but to Nye with great skill. Most people probably still think Nye is an evil abuser. I didn't literally confront her today, but I might as well have done.

What is especially disturbing is that I felt the galloping fury towards Della that Wayne does towards me. I really must avoid her in order to prevent myself hitting her or worse. Luckily, unlike Wayne, I don't drink so I think I'll be able to behave myself.

But people must stop telling me the lies and whatnot that Della has said about me behind my back. They don't seem to realise how provocative it is!

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My partner tries to get on with everyone. He is quite terrified of offending anyone in a small town like this. Of course, no sensible person would go out of their way to make enemies. But his approach was too rigid, too 'one size fits all.'

What he was failing to take into account is that a fake friend is much more dangerous than an open enemy. Nye told me yesterday that Della didn't have friends. She had people she used.

He guessed that I had offended her by ignoring her. But she had been ignoring me, so my deduction was that it was all over between us. I thought she wanted me to ignore her. Perhaps she expected me to fight for her!

Nye also said she was not bipolar although she could be a bit manic under the influence of alcohol. My partner also suspected she had NPD.

Nye opined that she was a narcissistic sociopath, and if Wayne is not exactly that, he is tending rapidly in that direction.

I'd been blaming myself for not seeing the truth. But I did see the truth. I just didn't realise how bad they were. Nye said Della was capable of anything.

I had actually severed relations with them which is - you would think- a sensible thing to do. But it is when an abused partner tries to leave a personality disordered spouse, that they are most at risk of deadly violence.

The best advice would be never to get involved with people like this in the first place. In fact, you can't avoid them, try as you might. They are everywhere.

They are over represented in politics. The Tory government is now behaving like a narcissistic abuser to vulnerable people.

I predicted earlier in this thread that Donald Trump would sack the head of the FBI. He did.

And this guy, Comey, is now testifying that Trump is - wait for it - a liar! A liar! Who would ever have guessed it?

Sam Harris guessed that Trump probably lied about 75% of the time. This was a bit of an underestimate. Timothy Snyder tells us the true figure is closer to 78%.

Those truthful things he says are of no significance. Truth telling is so rare for him, it is as if he does it by accident.

Yes, his whole team were probably in Russia's pocket. Now that it has been confirmed by Comey, they may all have to go. But what is shocking about the revelations? Didn't we all know the truth?

Two African American ladies, Diamond and Silk were interviewed on Newsnight by video link a while ago. They said things like, ''My president never does anything wrong!'' and dismissed the evidence as 'fake news.'
They sounded as if they were in a delusional state. They were like drugged up groupies.

Trump told us himself. He said that he could shoot someone at a campaign rally, and it wouldn't affect the loyalty of his core supporters at all. They are defended against reality.

Is there anything we can do to wake people up?

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Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy ( 20 July 1754 – 9 March 1836) was a French Enlightenment aristocrat and philosopher who coined the term "ideology". ... Under the Reign of Terror, he was arrested and imprisoned for nearly a year, during which he studied Condillac and Locke, and abandoned the natural sciences for philosophy. ... which formed the first draft of his comprehensive work on ideology, named Eléments d'idéologie. ... He conceived of ideology as the "science of ideas." ... The society of "ideologists" at Auteuil ... Destutt de Tracy was one of the principal advocates of liberalism during and after the Revolution. ... Tracy rejected monarchism, favoring the American republican form of government. This republicanism, as well as his advocacy of reason in philosophy and laissez-faire for economic policy, lost him favor with Napoleon, who turned Tracy's coinage of "ideology" into a term of abuse ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology

Ideology (from Greek ιδεολογία) is a comprehensive set of normative beliefs, conscious and unconscious ideas, that an individual, group or society has. ... An ideology is narrower in ambit than the ideas expressed in concepts such as worldview, imaginary and ontology. ... Political ideologies can be proposed by the dominant class of society such as the elite to all members of society as suggested in some Marxist and critical-theory accounts. In societies that distinguish between public and private life, every political or economic tendency entails ideology, whether or not it is propounded as an explicit system of thought. ... In the Althusserian sense, ideology is "the imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence".

Synchrony and diachrony are two different and complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A synchronic approach (from Greek συν- "together" and χρόνος "time") considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account. Synchronic linguistics aims at describing a language at a specific point of time, usually the present. By contrast, a diachronic approach (from δια- "through" and χρόνος "time") considers the development and evolution of a language through history. Historical linguistics is typically a diachronic study.

The concepts were theorized by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, professor of general linguistics in Geneva from 1896 to 1911, and appeared in writing in his posthumous Course in General Linguistics published in 1916. In contrast with most of his predecessors, who focused on historical evolution of languages, Saussure emphasized the primacy of synchronic analysis to understand their inner functioning, though never forgetting the importance of complementary diachrony. This dualistic opposition has been carried over into philosophy and sociology, for instance by Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre. Jacques Lacan also used it for psychoanalysis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a name commonly associated with philosopher Jacques Derrida's critical outlook over the relationship between text and meaning.

Derrida's approach consists in conducting readings of texts with an ear to what runs counter to the structural unity or intended sense of a particular text. The purpose is to expose that the object of language and that which any text is founded upon is irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible. Throughout his readings, Derrida hoped to show deconstruction at work, i.e., the ways that this originary complexity—which by definition cannot ever be completely known—works its structuring and destructuring effects.

... Jacques Derrida's 1967 work Of Grammatology introduced the majority of ideas influential within deconstruction. According to Derrida and taking inspiration from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, language as a system of signs and words only has meaning because of the contrast between these signs. As Rorty contends, "words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words...no word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic ( e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form.)" As a consequence meaning is never present, but rather is deferred to other signs. Derrida refers to the — in this view, mistaken — belief that there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning as metaphysics of presence. A concept then must be understood in the context of its opposite, such as being/nothingness, normal/abnormal, speech/writing, ...

Richard Grannon says that narcissistic abusers are like zombie witch doctors. They want you to stay asleep so they can continue to use you. When there is a danger that you will wake up, and rise out of your little zombie grave, they will try to put you back to sleep.

This doesn't just apply to intimate human relationships. It can happen on a political level too. I heard an academic who had been forced to flee Zimbabwe, talking in a disgusted way about the state of that country on the radio.

The interviewer asked him, ''If they don't want prestigious people like you in Zimbabwe, who do they want?'' The guy replied, ''They want zombies.''

OK - a fairy corpse : I am that narcissistic zombie ... Everybody keeps on congratulating me on not winning The UK General Election 2017 but honestly even if I am looking as half dead as Jeremy Corbyn I just do not want to be The Leader ... I was looking at some footage - historical and dramatical - of Oswald Mosely the other night and I can see why many admired him more than Adolf Hitler : his oratory was far better and his rhetoric was compelling - close your eyes and ignore The Blackshirts and The Man is Mosely ... Oswald is surely The One - he obviously has all of these multi-tasking skills and a can-do attitude : surely he is the best candidate for absolutely any job ?

You do know, don't you, Dai, that Diana Mosley was the elder sister of the Duchess of Devonshire that that stupid dangerous fecker Wayne had been brown nosing? She was the fourth Mitford sibling in order of age.

Oswald Mosley was a narcissist if ever there was one. And he was a menace. I'm not just thinking of the battle of Cable Street. He was responsible for rabble rousing after WW2 that left one West Indian guy dead.

He would say, ''It's winalot for dogs and kite-kat for wogs!'' But when one of his fanatical followers stood up to advocate carrying on where Adolf left off, and ended, ''If you want to know who would turn on the gas taps, it's me!'', Mosley pretended he hadn't spoken. This guy's son later found out there was Jewish blood in the family. I'm not surprised. Wasn't the Orlando bomber gay?

Mosley was banned by the BBC for many years, and I don't know why they lifted the ban. That's a horrific chat show. Clive James said Mosley didn't utter anti-Semitism. He just embodied it.

I can't see the distinction he makes between people who are anti-Semitic for the sake of it, and his own antipathy for Jews which was different somehow.

He had a trick with his eyes, flashing them at people in a hypnotic way. In his time, he was lauded for his film star looks. I don't think his style would go down well today. He looks like an obvious scoundrel.

Few could resist his charm when he was a young man. You've heard of a one time viceroy of India, George Nathaniel Curzon who was 'a most superior person'? Mosley's first wife Cynthia 'Cimmie' Curzon, was one of the daughters of the viceroy.

Cimmie followed his political shifts and herself became a Labour MP during his Labour phase. She was hurt by his compulsive womanising.

He told a friend that he was going to confess to Cimmie about all the women he had seduced. ''What, all?'', echoed the friend. ''Well, not quite all'', amended Mosley, ''Not about her sister and her stepmother.''

It was devastating enough as it was. ''But they are all my best friends!'' she wailed. She died young of peritonitis. She didn't put up a fight. It was as if she had no will to live.

Mosley had in fact had affairs with both of Cimmie' sisters. One book claims that he also initiated Unity Mitford into sex when she was 18. She was the sister of his future second wife. Diana Mosley told Mavis how awful and disgusting it was that she and Oswald had been imprisoned without charge during WW2. But if they had had their way, many innocent people would have been put in much worse places.

Diana used to be a holocaust denier. She got over it, but the BBC announced when she died in her 90s in 2003, that she had been an unrepentant Nazi. Because she was a toff, people described her saying of terribe things as 'honesty.' But David Aaronovitch called it 'stupidity.'

She always said that Mosley was persecuted because 'he was right.' She had to go on deluding herself about him, because she had made so many sacrifices for him, including that of her reputation. The strange thing is that in some of her articles, Diana appears extremely tolerant for her time - for instance about homosexuality when it was still illegal.

I've recently read that Nancy Mitford wrote to a friend that her holiday had been ruined by the presence of a disabled tourist in a wheelchair. I've just about had a gutsful of the Mitford sisters.

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Since the episode with Wayne and the rather embarrasing subsequent encounter with the manager which I came out of with as much dignity as I could muster, I've been in Wetherspoons in this town to speak to people, but hadn't ordered anything.

I was embarassed to face the staff, hoped they hadn't heard of the situation and was a little afraid they might challenge my presence if I tried to have a transaction at the bar.

So I went up to a friendly acquaintance in the place yesterday who knew what Della was like. I told him the story partly to explain why I couldn't speak to Della again. I truly think it's desirable that people know what she's capable of, so they will be forewarned and forearmed.

But I was also hoping that I could persuade him to take my money and order at the bar for me. Instead, he thought he saw what was requried.

He went up to the bar and told all the young kids who were working there, ''This lady's very embarrassed'', in a loud voice. He then told them the whole saga, and asked if it was OK for me to come in again. I certainly was embarrassed after that!

My partner said later, ''What a silly thing to do!'' Another friend Elfed had returned from holiday. He had bought Della and her drinking pal Sian champagne to celebrate Sian's birthday. Della didn't appreciate it much. She gave him a lot of verbal abuse.

He said her behaviour was unacceptable. But he finds it hard to resist it.

Last edited by marianneh on Wed Jun 21, 2017 10:35 pm; edited 1 time in total